


Memento Moray

by autobotscoutriella



Category: Transformers (Bay Movies)
Genre: (....ish?), (because the Cybertronian ones didn't have the right tone), (sort of), Amusing Injuries, Cybertronians vs Sea Life, Gen, Humanized Swear Words, Humor, Mild Angst, Moray Eels, Sexual Humor, Underwater Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 22:01:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19981204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autobotscoutriella/pseuds/autobotscoutriella
Summary: After an unfortunate run-in with the enemy, Barricade contemplates death and (sea) life.





	Memento Moray

At least the water wasn’t as cold as it _could_ have been.

Barricade stared up at the hints of sunlight filtering down through the water, making the surface look tantalizingly close. It wasn’t. Even if he had been able to reach the top of the underwater rock piles—and with a crushed leg, _that_ wasn’t happening—there was still another forty feet or more to the surface. He wasn’t built for swimming.

_Damnit, where’s that fucking airlift?_

Nowhere to be found. Rescue wouldn’t arrive until after dark, and then only if there were no signs of Autobots or humans in the area. No one was going to risk a run-in with armed enemy units just to pull him out. He might be at the bottom of the ocean, but no one was going to risk their plating to come get him a few hours early. After all, he was alive, mostly intact, and probably going to stay that way.

Unlike the _rest_ of the Decepticons currently at the bottom of the ocean. That was a grim thought, but it was hard to keep his mind off it under the circumstances.

So many Decepticons, tossed into the ocean and left to rust. Barricade hadn’t particularly cared for any of them, but it was an ugly way to go, and sitting half-wedged in the sand with a bad leg gave him more time to think about it than he would have preferred.

He’d gotten lucky this time, and luckier a year ago when the AllSpark had been destroyed. The rest of his comrades hadn’t.

Barricade still had trouble believing the reported death toll from that ill-fated battle. Some of it made sense. Bonecrusher should’ve known better than to take a swing at a team including Optimus Prime—that was _asking_ to get your helm bashed in. Brawl wasn’t built for urban combat. Of course he’d been outmaneuvered by lighter, faster vehicles.

But he was supposed to buy that Blackout—who never risked his own plating if he could send someone else in first—had been struck by a sudden attack of courage and somehow put himself in a position where a _human_ could gun him down, of all things? And that _Megatron_ had made the same mistake? Neither of those things had happened in four million years, and somehow the enemy had gotten lucky enough to have both of them on the same afternoon? No, that sounded like the kind of information the Autobots would “accidentally” leak onto an open comm line in the hopes of demoralizing any remaining Decepticons.

Or the kind of thing Starscream would come up with to explain away deaths that coincidentally happened to benefit him and that he didn’t want to admit to causing, Barricade conceded. The Seeker had barely shown up on Decepticon comms since the battle, but he _had_ confirmed the original reports with a little embellished detail.

In the rocks, something stirred.

Barricade jerked his attention away back to the present, optics fixing on the gap, spinning blades ejecting even though they were probably useless underwater. The space was too small for any full-sized Cybertronian, but a bomb, an EMP blast, a Cassetticon, maybe even an armed human could have fit, and he didn’t care to encounter _any_ of those just now.

The source of the movement, when it finally appeared, was none of the above.

Barricade stared blankly at an oversized, slime-coated, hideously ugly, brown-green spotted organic creature, with a body shape that seemed to resemble some monster’s _spike_ more than anything else and a set of sharp teeth hanging out of what was _probably_ the head.

_What the fuck is this planet, even._

The spike creature circled his good leg, mouth gaping slightly to bare even more teeth. Barricade eyed it warily, wondering if it could bite through metal, and what would happen if it tried.

Once, he would have mocked the idea of an organic damaging any Cybertronian in any situation. But this planet wasn’t exactly the walk through Praxus he’d been promised when assigned to scout out the AllSpark’s location. And the briefing hadn’t said a damn thing about ugly organic spike creatures. 

Beady yellow optics stared him down as the creature glided sinuously up his leg toward his head. Barricade swiped at it, but missed; it dodged around his servo with jarring grace, despite its clumsy appearance. He pulled back, optics on the teeth as it came ever closer.

“Fuck _off_.” Underwater, the words were unintelligible even to him, and he wasn’t surprised when the creature did not, in fact, fuck off.

Instead, it nipped a cable.

Swearing both internally and in a verbal flurry of bubbles and splashing, Barricade jerked back and kicked out at it. The creature glided just out of reach and circled, teeth bared, though it kept its distance for the moment. Maybe he didn’t taste good.

“Fuck off. Fuck you. What the _fuck._ ” It couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but it felt _good_ to curse something out. _Something_ might as well hear about how badly his day was going.

Still muttering curses at the stupid spike-shaped creature, and its presumably stupidly spike-shaped creator, and whatever fucking deity had decided that _he_ , personally, was going to have to deal with an organic dick monster, Barricade took a moment to examine his leg while the thing was well out of reach. It hadn’t done much damage, but there were distinct, painful teeth marks in the cable it had bitten. He took a second to briefly link his internal networks to the planet’s databases, searching up an image of a similar creature with blue spots.

A _moray eel._ Common to the area.

Huh. He would have called it something obscene. There weren’t many not-obscene words that seemed to provide a fitting description.

Craning his neck back to keep an optic on it, Barricade wondered again why he was still stuck on this cursed backwater organic planet that apparently stocked its oceans with hideous spike creatures and—reportedly—had heavy enough weaponry to take down Megatron himself.

The plan had been simple. Grab the AllSpark. Return it to the Decepticons, or gather the Decepticon army to it, whichever was quicker. Restore Cybertron, or conquer a new planet if Cybertron was gone. End of story.

Huh. So much for that.

It never should have gotten to the point of a pitched battle with the Autobots in the first place. And when it had, they should have stuck to the _plan._ That was the point of having a _strategy_ , a concept that had apparently gone the way of the Predacons as soon as the AllSpark was within reach. Who had originally fucked it up, he didn’t know—he’d been unconscious at the bottom of a bridge after that first crash by then. Maybe Bonecrusher taking a swipe at Prime had done it. Maybe air support hadn’t showed up in time to keep the ‘Bots from regrouping.

It didn’t really matter now, he supposed. The whole situation was as fucked-up as the idea of organic spike creatures, he thought, glaring up at the thing still circling over his head. And whether or not he was right about the reports of the death toll being greatly exaggerated, Blackout and Megatron both had been out of contact for long enough that it didn’t matter if they were technically alive or not. They might as well be dead at the bottom of the ocean—or alive at the bottom of the ocean—for all the use they were now.

A grim smile flashed across Barricade’s face. He didn’t particularly like imagining former allies as corpses, even the ones he’d hated as much as they hated him, but picturing Bonecrusher’s reaction—or Blackout’s, for that matter—to being stalked underwater by hideous organic dick eels was a tiny ray of amusement lightening an overall shitty day.

Granted, he would have preferred to imagine it from somewhere warm and dry. If they ever conquered this damn planet, he was going to dump every single Autobot in the ocean in the nearest eel hotspot as payback.

The light from above was starting to fade—probably sunset, though his chronometer told him it would be at least a few more hours before it was dark enough for the nearest Decepticons to consider venturing out. The water was getting colder, too. Of course it was.

Something else moved in the rocks on his other side. When he turned to look, a second moray eel, this one with hints of yellow along its sides, was making its way down to inspect his injured leg. This one, apparently, was hungry, because it nipped a scrap of metal, and then a cable, and no amount of rapid, violent swiping at it made contact. Barricade muttered another string of obscenities.

It was going to be a _long_ few hours.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title is a pun on _memento mori_. I came up with it a couple years ago in college and made a moray eel-shaped bulletin board (get it, it's a moray for mementos) and looking at that was the prompt for the title of this fic.
> 
> I resisted the urge to tag this fic "dick monster" despite requests.


End file.
